par Moreau, Elisabeth
Référence Vegetative Powers: Endowing Bodily Life from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period (12-13 September 2018: University of Padua)
Publication Non publié, 2018-09-12
Communication à un colloque
Résumé : In Renaissance medicine, the vegetative soul was a central concept for the explanation of generation, growth and nutrition. As for generation, the faculties of the vegetative soul were considered as operating the development of the seed through its “formative” force. The origin of this soul within the seed, and more broadly, the transmission of life and the physiological functions from genitor to offspring, was one of the most difficult questions in the medical philosophy. Continuing Galen’s discussion in De semine according to Aristotle’s De generatione animalium, many Renaissance physicians attempted to solve the origin of the vegetative soul by investigating the form of the seed. In this paper, I will examine the “Hermetic” approach to this question as discussed at the University of Marburg. Famous for its chair of chymiatria founded in 1609, the medical faculty at Marburg promoted chymical medicine as an academic discipline. While historians have surveyed its practical training in pharmacology, its philosophical program still remains unexplored. Among the professors of medicine at Marburg, German physician Heinrich Petræus (1589-1620) advocated a “Hermetic” philosophy, merging Galenic concepts with the Platonic prisca theologia and the Paracelsian system. He published a disputation on generation and the origin of forms, entitled Disquisitio Hermetica de origine formarum e seminio virtute plasticâ instructo (1612), included in Johannes Hartmann’s Disputationes chymico-medicæ (1614). By examining his account of the vegetative soul, I will draw particular attention to his interpretation of the progression of seeds, the notion of “vital balsam,” and the explanatory model of vegetative multiplication.

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